The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has criticized the United  States of America over the country’s slow and insufficient response to strengthening global  resilience to climate change.
Reacting to the US action plan on climate change recently unveiled by President Barack Obama, a senior fellow and head of IIED’ s Climate Change Group, Dr Simon Anderson, said the emphasis on strengthening local governance for adaptation planning, developing new risk management tools and climate adaptation technology were helpful but ‘security’ was misguided and was likely to bias the way that resources were deployed for that objective.
An IIED statement last week posted online and signed by Dr. Anderson, indicated that the main instrument for addressing the US policy objective was and would be the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
He said that USAID as an agency had notoriously acted in isolation and seldom consults adequately with country governments before implementing such initiatives.
“This is the first time that the Federal government has announced significant adaptation actions at home, reflecting the fact that – importantly – Obama recognises that the United States faces  adverse impacts from climate change that it must adapt to. On the international level however the  promises for action, while welcome, are a little too late!”
The IIED Fellow further stated that it was good to see a leader of the world’s richest country and biggest cumulative polluter finally promise to take actions, after over a decade of refusal to do so, but that the problem had become much bigger while the US was ignoring it.
The world, he said was headed towards 4-degree temperature rise by 2100 unless much more drastic actions were undertaken on mitigation by all countries including the United States.
“President Obama says he wants the US to lead this effort globally. His promise is welcome, but his actions still fall short of what is required.”
On the mobilization of Finance, Dr. Anderson expressed the view that the resources garnered so far by the US and other industrialised countries had been dwarfed by the imposed costs of increased climate variability on the economies and societies in the developing world.
Also optimistic assumptions of the scale of private sector contributions to resilience investments have proved so far to be ‘pie in the sky’ and there was no evidence that that would change any time soon – at least until medium term profits could be guaranteed to investors.
He said that the cases of failed weather-indexed crop insurance showed how reluctant the private sector was to outset the costs of adaptation to the climate vulnerability.